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Related Questions
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Google Penalty Checker Tool
What is the best tool to check for the google penalty, What penalty hit the website. ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Can You Help Confirming That 1stWebDesigner Was hit by Panda 4.0 and PayDay Loans 2.0,3.0?
Hello, really hoped for your feedback here. So my site is http://www.1stwebdesigner.com I just used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - and came to realization, that indeed we might have been hit by famous Panda 4.0 update. Here is screenshot from Barracuda tool - https://www.evernote.com/l/AELGaZ6nyxBE1aK7oQJVHBPKJuwjUh5JWk8 and in attachment there is Google Analytics screenshot for that time - especially May, 2014. Can you please help me confirm that we indeed have been hit with the Penalty? It has been 1.5 years already and since then, the traffic never has grown more. Before May, 2014 our site received 1.5 million pageviews/mo, after it..until this moment traffic has never been more than 600,000 pageviews/mo. Now if I look back even more with Barracuda tool, I can see it was also affected by Top Heavy 1.0 update,Thu Jan 19 2012. Even back then before all these updates site grew to 2.5 million pageviews/mo. What is the painful part I always focused on time-consuming link building. Submitting links to design news sites, leaving quality comments under related articles and always have written unique quality content on site for years. Can you tell based on screenshots and confirm we indeed have penalty. And maybe suggest what are the actions to take now? I have ahrefs pro subscription and started using Disavow tool to prepare for submission to Google. Would love to hear feedback on this..it has been painful throughout years. Update: here is one more screenshot from Barracuda looking from 2012 year to traffic - https://www.evernote.com/l/AEIX6iP4USBGtbyRLZ1oTmcACgBtXHBP2rw SpRPIyY
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | researchninja0 -
Given the new image mismatch penalty, is watermarking considered "cloaking"?
Google has released a new penalty called "Image mismatch". Which actually penalizes sites that show images to Google than are not the same as the ones offered to users when accessing the site. Although I agree with those sites that the image is completely different that the one shown in image search, lately I've seen lots of big sites using some king of watermark or layer that reads something like "To see the high quality of this image, click here" in order to "force" the user to visit the site hosting the image. Considering the latest changes to Google's image search, which made lots of sites lose their "image search traffic", are these techniques considered part of the new penalty Google is applying? Or does it only apply to the first scenario when the image is completely different? You can read more on this new penalty here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Why will Google not remove a manual penalty against us?
Our site was placed under a manual penalty last year in June 2012 after penguin rolled out. We were advised by Google that we had unnatural links pointing to our site. We fought for months, running backlink checks and contacting webmasters where Google's WMT was showing the sites which had links. We have submitted numerous reconsideration requests with proof of our efforts in the form of huge well labeled spreadsheets, emails, and screen shots of online forms requesting link removal.When the disavow tool came out we thought it was a godsend and added all the sites who had either ignored us or refused to take down the links to the disavow.txt with the domain: tag. Then we submitted another reconsideration request, but to no avail.We have since had email correspondence with a member of the Google Quality Search Team who after reviewing the evidence of all our previous reconsideration requests and disavow.txt still advised us to make a genuine effort and listed sites which had inorganic links pointing to our site which were already included in the disavow.txt.Google has stated "In order for your site to have a successful reconsideration request, we will need to see a substantial, good-faith effort to remove the links, and this effort should result in a significant decrease in the number of bad links that we see."We have truly done everything we can and proven it too! Especially with all the sites in the disavow.txt there must be a decrease in links pointing to our site. What more can we do? Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Benbug0 -
Recovering from an Automatic penalty
My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords) I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site. The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update). If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover? Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Recovery Steps For Panda 3.5 (Rel. Apr. 19, 2012)?
I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used - especially on sites that are not large scale ecommerce sites. Blog site hit by Panda 3.5. Blog has approximately 250 posts. Some of the posts are the most thorough on the subject and regained traffic despite a Penguin mauling a few days after the Panda attack. (The site has probably regained 80% of the traffic it lost since Penguin hit without any link removal or link building, and minimal new content.) Bounce rate is 80% and average time on page is 2:00 min. (Even my most productive pages tend to have very high bounce rates BUT those pages maintain time on page in the 4 to 12 minute range.) The Panda discussions I've read on these boards seem to focus on e-commerce sites with extremely thin content. I assume that Google views much of my content as "thin" too. But, my site seems to need a pruning instead of just combiining the blue model, white model, red model, and white model all on one page like most of the ecommerce sites we've discussed. So, I'm asking people who have recovered from Panda to share what criteria they used to decide whether to combine a page, prune a page, etc. After I combine any series articles to one long post (driving the time on page to nice levels), I plan to prune the remaining pages that have poor time on page and/or bounce rates. Regardless of the analytics, I plan to keep the "thin" pages that are essential for readers to understand the subject matter of the blog. (I'll work on flushing out the content or producing videos for those pages.) How deep should I prune on the first cut? 5% ? 10% ? Even more ? Should I focus on the pages with the worst bounce rates, the worst time on page, or try some of both? If I post unique and informative video content (hosted on site using Wistia), what I should I expect for a range of the decrease in bounce rate ? Thanks for reading this long post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustDucky0 -
If this is what happens when a penalty is removed, I want more penalties
So a couple of weeks ago I posted that we had submitted a reconsideration request along with a list of about 40 spam pages that were linking to us that we had attempted to have remove their links to us. On 8/3 we received a note from Google that our manual penalty had been removed. We have thousands of inbound links so these 40 pages were a minuscule part of our links and ones that we hadn't tried to get in the first place. So I thought "Great, our rankings should go up." Up until this point our year-to-year organic Google traffic was between 45% and 100% over last year. As of 8/9 our traffic is now only 26%-39% above last year. I don't think we can handle too many more penalty reversals like this one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0